Illinois Reforms Criminal Justice with Cloud-based Information System

Published: January 14, 2014

About

Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) protects the public from criminal offenders through incarceration, supervision, and rehabilitation. Originally designed for 34,000 inmates, the system now handles more than 49,000. The DOC is continually striving to improve recidivism rates by offering rehabilitation programs to inmates and helping the 28,000 parolees under its watch make a successful re-entry into society.

Business Situation

Governor Pat Quinn has promoted a vision for reforming the DOC to improve public safety and criminal justice in the state. He has signed legislation that aims to amend sentencing credit guidelines and enhance programs for assessing and reforming inmates. Implementing these statutes would have been extremely difficult using existing technology systems. The DOC used offender management technology from the 1980s that consisted of a mainframe system and 41 disparate applications. The system didn’t conform to modern corrections science practices. It also didn’t allow users to run aggregate analyses, for example to discover likely candidates for transfer in order to free up beds in the minimum security block. Such analyses required submitting a request to IT. Fulfilling the request could take a month or longer, by which time the population had already turned over significantly, with 200 to 500 intakes and releases occurring daily statewide. The system had also become unreliable and extremely costly to use and maintain. This, combined with the fact that critical offender information was scattered across so many different applications, put inmates and staff at risk.